Just A Thought ~ MYTHS DEBUNKED

"The world, men had begun to learn, was not a nest of revolving crystalline spheres with the earth at its precious center and man thereon as the chief concern of the moon, the sun, the planets, the fixed stars, and beyond all these, a King of Kings on a throne of jeweled gold, surrounded by nine rapturous choirs of many-winged luminous seraphim, cherubim, thrones, dominions, virtues, powers, principalities, archangels and angels. Nor is there anywhere towards the core of this earth a pit of flaming souls, screaming, tortured by devils who are fallen angels all. There never was a Garden of Eden, where the first human pair ate forbidden fruit, seduced by a serpent who could talk, and so brought death into the world; for there had been death here for millenniums before the species Man evolved: the deaths of dinosaurs and trilobites, of birds, fish, and mammals, and even of creatures that were almost men.

Nor could there ever have occurred that universal Flood to float the toy menagerie of Noah's Ark to a summit of the Elburz range, whence the animals, then, would have studiously crawled, hopped, swum, or galloped to their continents: kangaroos and duck-billed platypuses to far-away Australia, llamas to Peru, guinea-pigs to Brazil, polar bears to the farthest north, and ostriches to the south. It is hard to believe today that for doubting such extravagances a philosopher (Giordano Bruno, 1548 - 1600), was actually burned alive in the Campo dei Fiori in Rome, or that as late as the year of Darwin's "Origin of the Species," 1859, men of authority still could quote this kind of lore against a work of science."

~ Joseph Campbell, in "CREATIVE MYTHOLOGY"~